in the bleak midwinter

I am so ridiculously falling-over tired that I can't sleep. It's times like this that I hate the world, naturally. I am being productive, I am refusing to be cowed by my own sleep cycle, there is stuff to catch up on here, I think.

First of all, to get it out of the way, ( the mental health wank )

I don't know what to think about this whole affair now, to be honest. What I do know is that since, yes, about Wednesday, I have started to find some things fun and other things irritating, much in the manner that I would call normal. So, these are the small things I am finding make me happy, that weren't making me happy before:

-Christmas music. I raided lunatunes and have a beautiful version of the Chieftains singing "O Come All Ye Faithful" with an accompaniment of bells. I also have a deliciously camp cover of "Last Christmas" by Savage Garden (yay!) and, implausibly, the Eurythmics doing "Winter Wonderland".

In fact, speaking of Christmas, the city seems to be revelling in it. Oxford terms are eight weeks long - we're here for nine, because of noughth week - and so Michaelmas actually ends this Saturday, December 2nd. This has never stopped anyone from celebrating Christmas a full month early, and so the big tree is up on Broad Street, there's tinsel everywhere and Balliol's carol service was tonight.

And speaking of the big tree, it was a gift from the King of Norway. Claire came home to say she'd met the King of Norway, who went to Balliol and failed his degree, but endowed a lot of money so the JCR's real name is "The Norway Room." I found this terribly surreal.

Also, someone else - Ben, I think - mentioned that they'd seen the bodyguards around Nicole Kidman doing her scenes for Northern Lights, again on Broad Street. Makes me wish I still lived in college so I could hang out of upstairs windows and peer at the various goings-on.

-Sainsbury's blackberry yoghurts, 50p for four. Low-fat, at that. Wonderful things.

-Feminist theory. I had the political theory tute with Chris and two tute-partners and got through it without my brain exploding. I never, ever want to hear a tutor say the word "penetration" again in my life.

-Frangipani, a book I read seven weeks ago when I first got here and adored, and on the re-read, I am just as charmed as I was the first time. It's serving as my comfort reading because my bookshelf is sadly denuded at the moment. This is for a good reason - I'm lending a lot of books out, for some reason. I have discovered that Pat seems to invariably like the books I lend her - on my recommendation she's now read Northern Lights, Gaudy Night, Brideshead Revisited, and she just finished Night Watch and loved it. I was ridiculously happy, because it's probably my favourite book of all time, and she was happily going about the place shouting about "Truth! Justice! Freedom! Reasonably Priced Love! And A Hard Boiled Egg!"

I've just finished The Secret History, which Claire lent to me, and I loved it even if I did find it tremendously unsettling.

-I caved and got season 1 of The West Wing on DVD. Argh, I have no MONEY, never mind. It makes me happy. And Pedar rang me last week to complain I had got him hooked, he'd been watching it every week without me, could I hurry up and come home so he'd have someone to talk to about how great it was? For the win, yes!

-Cherwell. Yes, I am rarely delighted with them, but they have actually published my short piece on the geek quiz so I am pleased. And have already received angry email telling me that the Enterprise does not run on dilithium crystals, call yourself a geek? And I have graciously stood corrected, so there.

And three slightly bigger things to make me happy:

-Rowland, my diffident current philosophy tutor, telling me that he thinks I could get a first in my Ethics paper. As I've spent the whole of the term knowing I'm getting through it on miminal reading, this makes me very happy. If I sit down over Christmas and do some real work on the subject, I could do well in it. It's my very first Finals paper, so, yay!

(Unfortunately, my Tutors' Handshaking is tomorrow afternoon. This may not be fun. It is never fun. And for PPE particularly. My last Tutors' Handshaking, I had seven tutors, and I had to sit in the middle of the circle and feel very intimidated.)

-My mum came to visit me! Not because I felt rubbish - I hadn't told her; she has waaaaay too much to worry about already - but just because she wanted to see me. She finished her nights on call, bought a ticket on a whim and came down, and it was wonderful. I didn't feel remotely rubbish. We went shopping, and we ate a lot, and we went to see a play at the OFS, and then we got a pizza and a bottle of wine and sat on my bed and talked for hours and it was just so lovely to see her. This morning she woke me up, shoved me at the shower and when I came out she'd started tidying my room. I love my mum.

I took her down to the train station this afternoon only to find that there are no trains going north from Oxford today at all. (Blatant prejudice against northerners, clearly!) She took six hours to reach Liverpool. Urgh. In a week I'll be back in Liverpool myself. I think this is a good thing.

-Lastly. Lastly. I need to take a deep breath, but chiasmata and I are GOING TO SEE THE INDIGO GIRLS, OMG! In February, at Shepherd's Bush Empire, and we have tickets and just OMG OMG! It is the best thing EVER. I am insanely excited.

On the topic, I uploaded a bunch of their songs for chiasmata and ( anyone else )

So there is much good stuff on the horizon, and I don't know, I don't think these blood test results are going to change anything. If I've got something, I've got something; if, on the other hand, it all comes up blank, that doesn't mean I have depression. I feel better. I feel better tonight than I have for weeks. I fully appreciate I have been being thoroughly rubbish, and have not replied to comments, emails, texts, even letters, and I apologise. If I'm meant to do something for you - like, for example, burning you things - it will get done, I promise.

I guess I'll leave you with something that amused me tonight. It is a neologism that I believe should be adopted into common usage as soon as possible.

One of the things I had to do tonight was finish off an application for section editor of Cherwell. One of the questions was what I would change about the section I was applying for. Garnering opinions over the kitchen table, I said tentatively, "I'd like to say I'd make it less wanky-pretentions. But how do you put that into formal language?"

Claire suggested I address the tone, the flippancy of it. I think some of the features are geared to address a very particular sense of humour, and I'd like to expand that. So I scribbled a note to that effect, and was about to go back to my laptop when Ben stood up from getting something out the fridge to ask, "You know how you can wax lyrical?"

"Yes," I said. Claire concurred.

He picked up a bottle of milk and said, "You can wax lyrical. I think you can wank pretentious."

Amen.